What if I told you, that SEO is the overwhelmingly best strategy for online marketing, and the #1 service you should be pitching to your prospects?
You might tell me I’m crazy. Most people would. With online conversations revolving around ads, pay-per-click, and advertising, it’s easy to slip into the mindset that ads are the future of marketing.
But that’s dead wrong.
Maybe you’ve caught yourself wondering:
- “Is SEO even worth offering to my clients anymore?”
- “Should we pivot and offer social media instead?”
I understand your thoughts, but please read this article in its entirety before making a decision.
Over the last decade, I’ve worked with thousands of agencies to improve the quality of their service offering.
I can tell you 100%…SEO is not dead. In fact, it’s #1 service you should offer your prospects.
This post details 6 big reasons you need to offer SEO as a service in 2021, and beyond.
This video has 🔥 insights
1. SEO Has No Traffic Ceiling
As more and more traffic channels are moving toward “pay-to-play” traffic models, marketers and agencies have started to throw in the towel. Many believe their traffic will always be limited by their budget. But that’s just not true.
A study from Shareaholic showed Google Search drove more traffic to websites than all of social media combined.
SEO has a big leg up on other marketing services because it revolves around the keywords or phrases someone is interested in one precise moment.
Look at social media. Your audience is scrolling for a dopamine fix. Content in their feed is a blur, and you’ll be lucky to get a 2 or maybe 3 seconds of their time – max. Social algorithms don’t favor business marketing organically anymore, so you turn to ads.
If you advertise, even if it’s well-targeted, you’re still interrupting your audience’s browsing experience. Your first obstacle is just getting their attention.
Eventually, you’re going to reach a cap at the number of sessions you’re able to drive to your site because your organic reach is limited and you’ve tapped out your advertising budget.
Organic traffic isn’t tied down by these limitations because users are actively searching for what you offer.You can gather a larger audience, get them to spend a much longer time reading or watching what you want them to watch, and best of all, there’s no ceiling to how much traffic you’re able to drive to your website – your growth potential is exponential.
Social Media isn’t all bad – it’s really an outstanding tool. SEO beats all the other services when it comes to what you can do as an agency and the services you should offer, but that doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t worth pursuing for a lot of reasons. For example, we’re really active in our Facebook Group, because it’s awesome for networking with members of our Training Program, Facebook takes the cake.
2. SEO Traffic is the Most Profitable
Imagine an online purchase you’re going to make, or research. Let’s pretend you’re going to buy some SaaS tool, or a pair of black shoes. What do you do first?
If you’re like 99.9% of consumers, you crack open a web browser, click in your Google search bar, and type in “black shoes size 10”, or “best customer relationship management software 2020” and you click on one of the first few results.
Social Media is becoming more obviously a brain-dead time drain. Even if you find the perfect person, you’re going to have a hell of a hard time pulling them out of that habitual-scroll to pay attention to your marketing message.
No matter how you target an ad, or build an audience, you’re never going to be more profitable with social than SEO. Don’t waste a client’s budget on guesswork about when the audience is ready to buy; let them tell you what they’re looking for. They’re typing it into search engines.
Search intent is what makes SEO so profitable. Not only is your traffic growth limitless when you capture enough keywords, it’s one of the most profitable services in today’s digital ecosystem – for you, and your client.
3. SEO is the most scalable service to offer
“Scalable” is a buzzword that gets thrown around too much. What I’m talking about when I say “scalable” is really the ability to productize your service.
When I’m growing or building agencies, I put a heavy focus on defining simple, scalable processes that streamline your workload and free up your time – so you’re able to grow.
When it comes to marketing services, no other service offering is as scalable as SEO packages.
With social media or advertising, there’s a lot of variables that make it difficult to streamline your services. Account shutdowns, building creative, testing…these are things that are incredibly difficult to build repeatable processes around.
But when it comes to SEO, we can easily turn it into a well oil machine to deliver results for clients, over and over again.
Organic reaps rewards far into the future, and when we start seeing massive returns, we may already be moving forward into our next campaign. Because we knocked out most of the heavier-workload tasks up front, we’re able to manage dozens of campaigns at a time, with disrupting progress.
4. The SEO Industry is Mature
I remember a decade or so ago when I had to use a Powerpoint, diagram, or presentation to explain why a prospect needed to invest in SEO.
Those days are behind us now. Most companies know exactly what SEO is, and even have it budgeted into their marketing expenses.
Business benefits aside, I like to consider time-savers and quality-of-life benefits too, and this one can be huge for you.
If you’ve been fortunate enough to never have a client who was skeptical about your services, it’s a hassle. It seems like no one in the room is sure why we’re there.
SEO hardly requires an explanation anymore. That’s a lot of mental energy you can use for more productive activities.
That’s not to mention how much SEO lends itself to your ability to pitch, sell, and close contracts. I like sales calls, don’t get me wrong (we created an entire module on how to run sales calls for marketing agencies) but if I don’t need to do them, I’m always happier.
SEO sells itself.
5. Retainers are paid up-front
This is one I don’t hear talked much about, but up-front payment is a big benefit for our SEO contracts. SEO contracts are paid in a unique way compared to other services.
Unlike other digital marketing and digital services industries – where industry standard is to be paid upon delivery, or in increments – in SEO it’s standard to be paid up front.
At WEBRIS, the SEO agency I founded and sold, our model was delivery of the retainer on the 1st of the month, every month. This way, there’s no ambiguity for us if a client is delayed or late.
Obviously, it’s just nice to have money in the bank, but up-front retainers are also going to be a strategic benefit.
When you’re building an agency, your cash flow is critical. You’re going to need that cash for paying employees, outsourcing services, or possible business expenses.
Additionally, I find it’s a helpful tool in our toolkit to keep conversations focused on long-term goals rather than short-term activities.
Speaking of which…
6. Long-Term Contracts
SEO is the longest-term contract by far of all the digital marketing services you could be offering. An ad agency might be hired for 2 to 4 months in a sprint, then the contract will be paused while the client evaluates the performance of their campaign. Social Media doesn’t fare much better.
In SEO, in part because everyone is accustomed to organic traffic being the “slow growth” strategy, and our industry has matured, a 6-month minimum contract would hardly make your clients bat an eye.
The ability to lock your contract in for 12 months or more and get to work will give you a peace of mind and stability that’s basically unheard of in any other marketing industry.
With that kind of time, you’ll be able to formulate a bulletproof process that will churn out content and propel your clients’ traffic to new heights.
Want more?
We’ve built a whole training program designed to help you do just that.
This link will give you access to the exact same project plan we use for our own campaigns.
It comes with a video that shows you exactly how to run the plan from start to finish.
Ryan Stewart
I build, grow and sell digital agencies. Most recently, WEBRIS, a 7 figure SEO agency.